Social Media

How Instagram Is Becoming More Like Facebook

Your Instagram feed may start to resemble your Facebook News Feed in one significant way. Instagram is going to start displaying the pictures and videos in your feed based on their relevance to you, relying on algorithms instead of its reverse chronological feed. “The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post,” Instagram said in a blog post about the news.

Instagram wants you to “see the moments you care about first,” which may otherwise get lost in the sheer length of your feed. This is all to say that instead of scrolling back through hours of posts you may have missed in all the time you weren’t on Instagram, the first pictures that will show up in your feed will be pictures and videos the platform thinks you’re likely to like the most, based on your previous interactions on Instagram. The company says that its more than 400 million monthly active users miss an average of 70 percent of the videos and pictures in their feeds.

When Facebook changed its News Feed from a reverse chronological order of updates to an algorithm that surfaced stories more relevant to its users, some users were outraged, The New York Times notes. Similarly, some of Twitter’s users revolted against the service earlier this year when reports surfaced that the struggling platform would experiment with an algorithm-based feed. The hashtag #RIPTwitter started trending, with users bemoaning the social-media platform they once loved. Twitter quickly responded to the backlash, and now, it adds updates it thinks its people want to see at the top of their timelines while letting users opt in to the algorithmic timeline. It remains to be seen whether Instagram’s users will react as caustically when the changes go into effect over the next few months.